Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments relate to the field of wireless communications, including user assignment of resource blocks in wireless communications.
Background
Many wireless communication protocols modulate data using a multicarrier modulation scheme. For example, Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) is a common multicarrier modulation scheme. In a multicarrier modulation scheme, such as OFDMA, a wireless channel is divided into multiple tones. Each tone occupies a portion of the wireless channel bandwidth. During a transmission, data can be carried over the multiple tones in parallel.
To schedule the transmission, a plurality of tones can be grouped into resource blocks. Each resource block may contain a standard number of tones and may be assigned to a specific user receiver device.
To receive the transmission, a receiver device needs to know the resource block assigned to it. This resource block assignment may be specified in to preamble field of a wireless frame. However, because there may be a large number of possible resource block mappings to receiver devices, the preamble may be large. But the transmission of a large preamble may increase power consumption and consequently reduce battery life in the receiver device, e.g., a portable electronic device. Moreover, additional compute processing may be necessary to decode a large preamble. This may also increase power consumption.